Kevin Libin: How Calgary’s politicians killed art

What is art? It may be an unanswerable question, except if you’re the City of Calgary. In that case, the answer is easy: art is a rule to be obeyed.

That’s why the city is obliged to buy precisely $1.6 million worth of uncontroversial artwork and then must place it in a tunnel that runs under an airport runway. Never has there been a better symbol for how to both offensively throw away a fortune of taxpayer money while also debasing the very notion of what art is meant to be.

The city is in the process of planning a new tunnel leading to the airport, now that the Calgary Airport Authority has transformed traffic patterns by extending a runway over the old route.

City rules require that a portion of budgets from these kinds of projects be set aside for public art. City rules also require that the public art be placed at the site of the project. So, Calgary is impelled to buy close to $2 million worth of something it can call art, that it can put in a dark tunnel underneath an airport runway, where people racing to catch a flight can ignore it.

At least, we’ll want to make sure they ignore it. That, after all, is the paradox of “public art.” Though the theory behind it is that it should beautify the place where it’s put, if it becomes too beautiful, too eye-catching, it creates problems.

On a pedestrian walkway, the worst-case scenario is large crowds plugging up the sidewalk as they linger and debate some provocative public installation — which is why so much publicly funded street art tends to consist of bland things like bronze sculptures of humans sitting on park benches, taking up a perfectly good spot to relax, but at least giving tourists a tacky photo opportunity. But on a major thoroughfare like the coming airport tunnel, the risk of catching people’s interest is that distracted drivers end up causing accidents.

That’s why inoffensiveness and insipidness—arguably the very antitheses of meaningful art—is the rule. When Calgary had to unload, under the same policy, half-a-million dollars on an art project for a major underpass at Glenmore Trail in 2007, it hired an artist to sculpt a pattern of jumping trout into the concrete walls. Drivers might have glanced at them passing under Elbow Drive, if they dared to take their eyes off the road while flying up and down the 80 km/h freeway. Maybe longer if they’re stuck in traffic. They’re not exactly unpleasant to look at. But surely no one has yet felt their soul stirred.

“If we could spend it on something practical like better lighting, okay. But if we have to spend $1.6 million on fish carved into a wall or something, I don’t like that idea,” Jim Stevenson, the alderman for Ward 3, home to the airport, told the Calgary Herald about the tunnel art. We definitely want the tunnel to look its best, but you don’t want people to stop and see a piece of art in the middle of the tunnel and get hit from behind.”

But rules are rules. And rules like these were created by city council to make city council feel wonderful about how city council spends Calgarians’ tax dollars. Public art is how municipal politicians—otherwise bogged down in the banalities of property taxes, waste collection and storm sewers—get to feel cultured, even if the bland products they mechanically procure by regulatory fiat are anything but.

Luckily, Brian Pincott, the former perennial NDP candidate turned city councilor, thinks there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Literally. A “lighting designer” by trade, he told the Herald’s Jason Markusoff, “If you said to me as an artist, ‘give me some art inside this tunnel,’ I’d be all over it” — that’s assuming, as the city’s transportation director has cautioned, that the lights don’t confuse drivers. That’s because lights—green ones, blinking orange ones, blue and red flashing ones, and so on—actually constitute some of the primary visual signals that motorists rely on to navigate their way through traffic, and to see their way in the dark.

But even if Pincott could figure out a way to design lighting that fit within those constraints, perhaps especially if he managed to work within those constraints, his point underscores the absurdity and waste of the city’s bureaucratic and expensive art policy. And why governments have no business in the art business. Art is emotional. It’s supposed to mean something. And it’s supposed to enrich our lives. It’s not a technical accommodation of road safety rules. And it’s not something you “have” to do because some silly law insists upon it.

Sure, you could give anyone a couple of million dollars and they’ll come up with some kind of adornment to spend it on. Then, against our better instincts, we could call it “art.”

But that doesn’t mean anyone wants it. It doesn’t mean anyone will appreciate it. And it doesn’t mean that it will deliver an ounce of value to the city, even in an intangible way. All it means is that someone found a place to spend a big wad of taxpayers’ money that could have otherwise been put to something useful, or better, cut from the budget. In the hands of the City of Calgary, art has been lowered to something that costs exactly what the city rules say it must cost, spent in the place that it needs to be spent, and meets all the requirements that make it as unexceptional and unalluring as possible. How inspiring.